Friday, February 27, 2015

The past two weeks I've been working on the same Animation assignment. For this assignment we had the option to use one of three different rigs. Of course, me being the overachiever that I am, I chose the most difficult of the three rigs. The assignment was to focus on anticipation, overlapping action, and squash and stretch. All three of the rigs were essentially different variations of a squirrel. Because of the amount of work this animation required, this assignment was our first multi-week assignment. Like all of my other Animations, the first step was to plan it out. I had a rough idea of what I wanted to do in my head, so the next step was to sketch it out.

As you can see from my sketches, I wanted the character to bounce off of a branch like a diving board, do a flip, and bounce on the ground. I also sketched out some of the shapes that I wanted to achieve in the tail. This assignment was definitely difficult, but once again with the help of my peer buddy Lorenzo, I was able to figure out what issues I had with my animation and fix them. So without further ado, here's the final animation.

In the end I was quite happy with how this turned out, considering how crazy I felt working on that tail! Seriously, that was one hell of a challenge. Ray liked the work I did, specifically the weight my character possessed. His only comment was to adjust the tail a little bit so that it's overlap looked better.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

This week we moved past the bouncing ball and focused on overlapping action. As an Animator, Overlap is one of my favorite things, so I was really excited for this assignment. Like every assignment, the first step was to plan out the animation. We got to use this cool pendulum rig, which was basically a block with a tail attached to it. I ended up having to break the rig to get it to work the way I wanted, but I knew that I wanted to have the rig do a few loops in the air before coming to a halt.

Now that I knew what I wanted to animate, the next step was to jump into Maya! My peer buddy Lorenzo was a HUGE help this week and taught my some cool tricks to get my animation looking the way that I wanted it to!

I was pretty happy with how this turned out! Ray, my mentor, pointed out a few things to work on, mainly making sure that the tail part of the pendulum was never straight, to adjust some spacing issues, and to make sure my arcs were good.

The second part of the assignment was to do another pose, this time focusing on devastation. Now honestly I had a really hard time with this pose. I wanted something that showed devastation that wasn't cliche, not an easy task. I did a ton of sketches and tried a few of them out with Stu in Maya, but none of them felt right. Finally I came up with an idea like 5 hours before it was due and went with it. Here are my sketches!

So as you can see, the pose I went with had Stu clutching something in his arms. How about I just show you the final image.

I ended up having my pose set up so it looked like Stu had hit a squirrel with his car and was devastated at what happened. Ray suggested that to make this pose read more as devastated, rather than just sad, I should have Stu's head back and have him sitting on his legs.

Well I think that's everything! Oh before I forget, if you want to download that Squirrel rig I used you can! Animation Mentor has two rigs free for you to download (just make sure you credit the school)! You can find them both here!